The Western Producer places a lot of value on getting things right.
It starts with our reporters, who have accuracy embedded into their DNA.
However, no one is perfect, mistakes will sometimes be made and a fresh set of eyes is a crucial part of our standard operating procedure.
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Every story and column is copy edited by an editor who has been doing this for a long time.
And then, after the stories are laid out on a page, that page is proofed at least once and often twice.
When I first started working at the Producer in the mid-1980s, page proofs were printed and circulated around the newsroom.
Today they are digital PDFs, but we still take the task seriously and continue to believe that the more eyeballs we can place on our pages, the better.
Barb Glen has worn many hats at the paper over the years, including editor, and she is a page proofer extraordinaire.
Barb not only catches typos and other errors but also sentences that don’t make sense and headlines that could be much easier to understand.
Raelene Holth, one of the Western Producer employees who lays out our pages, is also a master proofer and often catches mistakes that everyone else missed. She has been saving our bacon for years.
So, it’s too bad the U.S. government didn’t have someone like Barb or Raelene on staff about 20 years ago when it came up with a rather ingenious idea for spreading the word across the Middle East about a $5 million bounty it placed on the head of Osama bin Laden, the terrorist responsible for the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
It printed information about the reward on the covers of matchbooks and distributed hundreds of thousands of them in a part of the world where smoking was still prevalent.
The matchbook cover also included a website address where people with information about bin Laden’s whereabouts could contact the American government.
It was brilliant, except for one problem.
According to a recent CBC story, the printers accidentally dropped one of the zeros so that the reward was only $500,000, and even more problematic, got the website address wrong.
A great idea went awry all because of the lack of a good proofer.
